Skills for resilience - for individuals and organisations

In this podcast, Professor Kevin Daniels speaks with Chris Tamdjidi, MD and business development director of Awaris, a multinational company that aims to strengthen the mental, emotional, and collaborative capabilities of people in companies. Kevin and Chris discuss how to cultivate resilient habits at individual and organisational level, drawing on insight drawn together in Chris' book: The Resilient Culture: How collective resilience leads to business success. 

Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:27:17

Helen Fitzhugh

Welcome to the Evolve Workplace Wellbeing podcast. This podcast is part of a toolkit of free, evidence informed workplace wellbeing resources provided by the Workplace Wellbeing Research team at the University of East Anglia in the UK. You can find the resources on www.evolveworkplacewellbeing.org

00:00:27:19 - 00:00:35:03

Kevin Daniels

Hello, Chris. So I'm with Chris Tamdjidi from a consultancy called Awaris.

00:00:35:05 - 00:00:36:05

Chris Tamdjidi

Awaris

00:00:36:05 - 00:00:58:14

Kevin Daniels

Awaris is a multinational based in Germany but works multinationally and is here to talk about organizational and personal resilience today. And as ever, on this podcast, we'd like to start by asking you a little bit about yourself and how you got into doing what you were doing and what it is that you do.

00:00:58:16 - 00:01:16:09

Chris Tamdjidi

So, yeah, really nice to meet you, Kevin. So, you know, I think myself, I took maybe an unusual pathway to this topic. So, I studied physics, so, and I worked in a consulting, you know, Boston Consulting Group for seven years, so I tend to have a one on one hand, you know, a little bit of analytic, analytical mindset.

00:01:16:11 - 00:01:38:21

Chris Tamdjidi

I've even been recently introduced as ‘he's a nerd, but he has some emotional intelligence’. So I thought that was kind of achievable. Thanks very much. And and then, I actually I became in my youth, I became very interested in mindfulness. So, I then actually led a network of meditation centres for seven years. So 75 meditation centres.

00:01:38:21 - 00:02:09:16

Chris Tamdjidi

So I was kind of very deeply into practice. And essentially then, you know, coming out of that was very natural to try to combine those two. And so we formed a company and, you know, we kind of basically worked on bringing together, you know, mindfulness and workspace. So that's kind of where we started. And, you know, I think about we have about 80 trainers around the world and we do a lot of work in the UK, you know, UK Parliament, we've worked a lot with, you know, with them and essentially what we've seen in the last 5 or 6, seven years is that there's been a, you know, stronger interest around topics of

00:02:09:16 - 00:02:31:23

Chris Tamdjidi

things like resilience and so on. And so that kind of piqued our, our thinking. We put on our thinking hats and we were just very curious to understand what really is resilience. And, you know, how do you actually shift it. Is it changeable. So I think that, you know, kind of approaching this topic in a slightly sceptical, analytical approach, kind of brought us to where we are in this, actually.

00:02:32:01 - 00:02:49:12

Chris Tamdjidi

And we we do a lot of work. We hold a resilience contract for 51 institutions of the EU. So we do a lot of work in, in large scale, you know, environments. We work a lot with global companies. We so, you know, we kind of have a lot of testing ground where we can do assessments and test, see outcomes.

00:02:49:12 - 00:02:53:08

Chris Tamdjidi

And so the kind of, you know, kind of brought us into this field and that's what we do.

00:02:53:10 - 00:03:18:24

Kevin Daniels

Okay. So that kind of hints at one of the things that we will return to my different throughout is conversations. This idea that resilience is a business thing. It's an organizational thing. But to start off with, you know, that at the end what is personal resilience and what isn't it? And I know you've got this battery analogy, which you kind of explained in, in the book that you and your team written.

00:03:18:24 - 00:03:22:23

Kevin Daniels

So, so what's resilience for you? More importantly, what it isn’t I think yeah.

00:03:23:03 - 00:03:36:15

Chris Tamdjidi

I think I have to start with what it isn't. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding, but resilience I mean, the word itself comes from material science. You know, people have applied the material science view of resilience. It's this ability to withstand, you know, be tough. You know, I mean, all this kind of stuff.

00:03:36:15 - 00:03:40:16

Kevin Daniels

Hooke's law, if you remember Hooke's law. Yeah. You you modulus and all this.

00:03:40:17 - 00:04:08:01

Chris Tamdjidi

Exactly. You know, all this kind of stuff. And basically that's not applicable to humans. We are not, you know, we are not objects that get pressured and come back into shape. We are organic beings, you know. So I think that was a very important starting point for me. And so then when you begin to look at, you know, people, there is a way of talking about people’s states, which is basically that in any moment in time, like now, there's a certain degree of arousal of my nervous system.

00:04:08:03 - 00:04:13:06

Chris Tamdjidi

You know, I could be very, you know, relaxed and very whatever. Or I could be really excited.

00:04:13:07 - 00:04:14:08

Kevin Daniels

Yes, yes.

00:04:14:10 - 00:04:32:20

Chris Tamdjidi

And, and, you know, connected to that, there is the valence of that arousal, okay. Which is, you know, is it something I'm looking forward to, am I expecting reward, or is this something I'm not looking forward to in any moment in time? You know, we humans, we are. We could be defined by that, by these two, you know, dimensions.

00:04:32:22 - 00:04:55:12

Chris Tamdjidi

And I think what's natural and or what's happening in today's working life is that we are being pushed into high arousal negative valence states. Okay. And so the old fashioned thinking about resilience is, oh yeah, you know, that corner you could say is really stress high arousal negative in this recent stress. And the old thinking about resilience is oh yeah you need to be enduring that state to function.

00:04:55:14 - 00:05:21:16

Chris Tamdjidi

And we I think clearly say no, not at all actually there's other states, other zones of our being and we call them, you know, stress regeneration, letting go and also growth. So four states that you can, you know, move around. And I think the key thing about resilience is the ability to navigate these states. So to not kind of try to endure, to get stuck into high stress or to collapse into, you could say a low energy state or whatever.

00:05:21:18 - 00:05:42:20

Chris Tamdjidi

But this ability to say, okay, yeah, you know, life is full of challenges and I have to be able to navigate that to shift state. And I think that that's a very useful way of talking about resilience. And I think one that I think what what's good about it is, is that a lot of people in the working world can relate to that, because it's not about stress being bad.

00:05:42:22 - 00:05:59:04

Chris Tamdjidi

Stress is necessary, you know, but it's about our ability to shift our state sometimes to be functioning in a stress state, stress is going to happen all the time to sometimes to be in a growth state where we're learning, where we're in a positive engagement, sometimes to be in a regenerating state where we're not so activated, but we're kind of recovering.

00:05:59:10 - 00:06:15:04

Chris Tamdjidi

And sometimes you need to have a kind of state of letting go, you know, like, you know, yeah, you know, leave me alone. You know, so I think that this view of resilience fits with a lot of modern thinking and is kind of more in line with how humans function well.

00:06:15:06 - 00:06:41:13

Kevin Daniels

So one of the things that I was really into – a concept I was really interested in, in reading your book was this idea that there is a, a window of tolerance, we, we can we can live in this negative state to some degree for some of the time. But eventually that, you know, if we spend too long out of it, you know, our window of tolerance shatters.

00:06:41:14 - 00:06:44:10

Kevin Daniels

Is that correct interpretation of.

00:06:44:12 - 00:07:06:08

Chris Tamdjidi

Yeah. I mean, this is a well established, you know, concept in, you know, psychological research. I think Dan Siegel was the one that kind of coined the term. And essentially what it says is that would you look at these two axes that I described, you know, arousal axes and the valence axes at in the centre of that space is what's called the window of tolerance, which is where basically where humans function best.

00:07:06:08 - 00:07:31:12

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. And essentially what is said is that when we're in this window of tolerance we are actually able to self-regulate. Okay. So you know I'm stressed but okay. I take a breath, I close my laptop, and then I just have a break, for example. That's a form of self-regulation, okay. And essentially what happens too many people sit there outside of their window of tolerance or in too high arousal or they're in too low arousal, depressed, you know, kind of they're unable to raise their energy or they're too excited.

00:07:31:12 - 00:07:52:12

Chris Tamdjidi

I mean, I know people, they kind of oscillate outside of this, you know, between high stress and then they play video games for three hours to kind of collapse at home, you see. I mean, they're always outside of their actual self-regulation. And so that is an important piece is that, you know, you cannot move around the landscape. You cannot kind of shift and be resilient if you're outside of this window of tolerance.

00:07:52:12 - 00:07:57:17

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. So that's a very important first step is for people to get back into their window of tolerance.

00:07:57:19 - 00:08:23:11

Kevin Daniels

Also I quite liked this idea you said about navigating around your kind of emotional states and things like that. But I guess with a background in mindfulness, you'll come at this - and you do and I see it in your book - that this is something you can learn. And it's kind of self-awareness. And navigating around your emotional states is, knowing where you are, having skills to move somewhere else.

00:08:23:13 - 00:08:28:03

Kevin Daniels

So how how do you go around sort of developing those skills?

00:08:28:05 - 00:08:43:24

Chris Tamdjidi

Yeah, I think there’s, you know, different ways of doing that. I mean, I think, you know, well, yes, I have come from a mindfulness background and I'm, you know, of course, a practitioner of mindfulness. I don't think it's necessary for everyone, you know, so I think that we talk about three levels of regulation. One is behavioural okay.

00:08:44:01 - 00:09:00:21

Chris Tamdjidi

So behavioural is just like you know let's say let's say I'm kind of get very stressed because my attention is poor or I kind of get restless. Okay. One level of regulation is behavioural, which means I put away my phone, I turn it on standby, turn off my notifications, and I just kind of do that so I have less fragmentation.

00:09:00:21 - 00:09:25:22

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay, second is a reflection level, psychological level where I kind of go, what wonder, what do I really need to be on always on? What is it in me that calls me to always respond to every little thing that pops in my screen? Okay, that's what's called psychological self-regulation. And then the third level is essentially, you know, physiological where you base, or neurophysiological, where you really basically actually train your attention to be less distractible.

00:09:25:22 - 00:09:46:19

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. So all those three are modes of shifting, are modes of actually training. If you are rigorous about, you know, putting away your device, putting away your notifications, you know, making sure you don't get interrupted, planning focus time in your calendar. That's a valid way of developing the skill. Others might choose to instead go into this self-reflection. Like why do I get so…?

00:09:46:22 - 00:10:05:24

Chris Tamdjidi

Why? Why do I get so antsy? Why do I get so, you know, addicted to the stimulus? And the third, you know, might actually just certainly just train their attention to stabilize your attention. So, you know, I think all three levels are valid and it happens. But I think that's one of the things we've seen is it depends upon what kind of person you are, which level, which way of training is best for you.

00:10:06:01 - 00:10:17:05

Kevin Daniels

Okay. Because one of the questions is going to ask there, is it you would think, you know, behavioural is the entry level and there’s a hierarchy you build on, are you saying that that isn't the case? It all depends on.

00:10:17:09 - 00:10:17:24

Chris Tamdjidi

I mean I think.

00:10:17:24 - 00:10:18:12

Kevin Daniels

The person.

00:10:18:12 - 00:10:36:19

Chris Tamdjidi

Exactly I think I do think that the behavioural, like you, is basically the easiest. Okay. Do you know, in the sense of it's kind of very simple, you know, please turn off the notifications, you know, put some focus time in your calendar and so on. But still we do find that people don't do it, you see. So even though on the one hand you would say it's a no brainer, just do it.

00:10:36:21 - 00:10:59:06

Chris Tamdjidi

People do struggle. And so I think I would say as well, I think if you really are new to a topic or new to a skill area, you know, let's say you struggle with sleep. I would always start with the behavioural, okay. These are the classic, you know, sleep tips from, you know, Matthew Walker. And, you know, kind of, you know, not having too many kind of, you know, late meals and coffee and, you know, whatever all of those things, you're seeing natural light during the day.

00:10:59:08 - 00:11:22:13

Chris Tamdjidi

But if you then still have trouble, then, you know, you do need to to go to the psychological level. Why is it like, for example, again, if you look at the sleep topic, okay, so some of you might do all the behavioural stuff, right, but find themselves lying in bed with their mind spinning. Okay. And so for them you do need a psychological for them to actually use a journaling practice to figure out, okay, how do, what's on my mind?

00:11:22:13 - 00:11:50:16

Chris Tamdjidi

Why does it come up in the dark when I have time? Okay. And then, you know, I, I think you can augment that. Or indeed, if you are already skilled, you can strengthen that by the physiological level. So again, the person lying in bed, if they've had some degree of mindfulness practice then they can go, okay, I'm going to now, you know, direct my attention to the my body sensations and actually kind of bring my mind into my body, you know, rather than floating around and actually relax my nervous system and therefore fall asleep more easily.

00:11:50:16 - 00:12:07:10

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. Same thing with attention regulation. So I think that this, you know, this neurophysiological or physiological level with people who have some degree of inner regulation of access to is, is, you could say, the most skill or the most sophisticated level, but it's not for everyone. It's not necessarily in every situation. Right.

00:12:07:11 - 00:12:33:01

Kevin Daniels

So, it also kind of on that skills based approach, there's there's a limit, isn't there, on what you can do simply through imparting skills to people. And you do a lot of work at the organizational level. So okay. So could you explain what led you towards looking more at the organization as a, as a, you know, a unit of analysis rather than just necessarily, you know, focusing on individual skills?

00:12:33:03 - 00:12:55:16

Chris Tamdjidi

Yeah, I mean, I think for one is I've looked at a lot of the data on well-being interventions, you know, and essentially that data always says that, yes, there is the individual level of, you know, well-being interventions. But actually, I mean, you have the recent, you know, Nice review, which came out, what, two years ago, you know, basically says, yeah, there is the individual level, but the individual level won't get you will only get you so far.

00:12:55:16 - 00:13:17:19

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. And so they distinguished, you know, between organizational level interventions and individual level interventions. And we essentially found the same thing in our data. Essentially we always assess people's stressors, how many stressors they're facing. You know, things like workload, things like financial stress in their personal life, things like, you know, conflict or maybe a care somebody they have to care for in their personal life, you know, a parent that they might have to care for.

00:13:17:19 - 00:13:49:17

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. So there's, you know, we use a standard stressor list for that. Okay. And then we also kind of assess people's, you know, stress levels, people's resilience levels. So for stress we use the perceive stress scale and resilience. We use the Conor Davidson Resilience Scale. And essentially when you begin to map these together you see actually okay for a certain amount of stressors, there is a real benefit in training people that we see that there's a high correlation between people's resilience outcomes and what they do, their resilience skills okay.

00:13:49:17 - 00:14:09:18

Chris Tamdjidi

So we've measured, we measure this. We measure people's skills. We measure resilience outcomes and we measure strength scores okay. So we see for typically up to about four stressors in life. Basically it makes a difference what people do okay. So therefore as a company you know at that level it's better to invest in people. Individual level interventions than it is organization.

00:14:09:18 - 00:14:33:14

Chris Tamdjidi

Because we see that the correlation between individual behaviour and outcomes and stress or resilience outcomes is higher then between the stress factors you're facing. Okay. So they it's been about 18% of the variance. And the individual behaviour explains about 40% of the variance. But we also see that that breaks down once you get into a zone of having 4 or 5 heavy stressors.

00:14:33:16 - 00:14:56:07

Chris Tamdjidi

What we see is that people's resilience declines massively and their resilience behaviour declines massively too. Okay. So what happens is when you're in very high stress environments is people just don't, you know, if if one of the things that makes your resilience is that your, you know, you connect well with friends and you have nice friends and they kind of, you know, and you play cards on Wednesday evening or whatever else, and you just don't get around to doing that anymore.

00:14:56:07 - 00:15:12:08

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay? And you don't walk the dog anymore. Your wife has to walk the dog and you don't, you know, really sleep very well anymore. Okay. So essentially and there you can really see and you can go and we kind of map this for organizations and we show them the breakdown of individual resilience. When is that not possible anymore.

00:15:12:10 - 00:15:25:20

Chris Tamdjidi

And therefore given that basically mathematically there's therefore low correlation between an intervention at that level and outcomes, you say you have to do something at the organizational level. Okay. And that's very much similar to the safety topic okay.

00:15:26:01 - 00:15:37:08

Kevin Daniels

So so this is just kind of so you saying about sort of 4 or 5 heavy stressors, that's the kind of tipping point where you really have to start looking at the organization.

00:15:37:10 - 00:15:57:08

Chris Tamdjidi

We’ve seen, it does vary by population type. So we have some populations where it's had been pointed to three stressors and some populations or even goes up to five. Okay. But it kind of depends a little bit on the type of work people are doing. So you again, we see that people who do high, complex, high social work that that tips earlier.

00:15:57:09 - 00:16:18:03

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. Because the type of work that they do requires more of them. Whereas for people who kind of do, you know, more simple or kind of solitary work there you see a less strong tipping. Okay. So it varies on the type of, you know, the type of work it varies upon also how many personal stressors people have in their life.

00:16:18:03 - 00:16:34:19

Chris Tamdjidi

So when you have people in certain age groups where they're facing more personal stressors. So for example, if you look at the 34 to 44 group, you know, they typically have, you know, children. Plus they have more financial concerns in the 55 plus group. So you see that, you know, so depends upon the population where the tipping point is.

00:16:34:19 - 00:16:52:09

Chris Tamdjidi

And that's very important for companies to understand to realize okay, for our population, both these people they do high you know, engagement work. Plus they're of a certain age group. Their stress tipping point will be different than, you know, some 55 year old engineers who work solitarily at their desk. As an example.

00:16:52:11 - 00:17:19:04

Kevin Daniels

Okay. So that that's that's sort of like understanding your demographic, isn't it? Similarly, if you know, you know, you’ve got, you know, say a population of 55 that's doing lots of lifting work there are going to be musculoskeletal problems. You need to do something about that. It's a very similar approach. So supposing I'm talking about businesses being resilient, what would be you would say 

00:17:19:04 - 00:17:33:23

Kevin Daniels

the generic things that resilient business would have? So we would have different approaches depending on the type of people that are employing the type of work. But is there a kind of philosophy that a resilient business would have or, you know, things underpinning those specific…

00:17:34:02 - 00:17:47:15

Chris Tamdjidi

I mean, I think it's, you know, it's very simple. First of all, they have to have a good understanding of what is resilience actually is do you see what I mean? You know, once you understand this navigating the zones, you actually go, oh yeah, of course our business has to navigate the zones too. You see. I mean, we need to have times when people are on.

00:17:47:15 - 00:18:06:03

Chris Tamdjidi

That's reality and stress. You know, it's fine, performing. And then we need to have times when people are growing. We need to have times when people are regenerating. And we need to have times when people are able to let go. Let go boundaries. You know all of that which comes with letting go. Okay. So I think that that's a very important first step is a shared understanding of resilience.

00:18:06:03 - 00:18:25:23

Chris Tamdjidi

And to understand how performance and human resilience are connected. So we do a lot of that showing actually in these different zones how performance, you know, is affected because we do we also do assessments on people's performance and self-efficacy okay. So once you have that in place that people in that businesses understand. Oh yeah, you're right. It's not just pedal to the metal, you know.

00:18:25:23 - 00:18:41:22

Chris Tamdjidi

And everyone hold on, you know. And then if we have a 5%, you know, I mean we have some companies that I'm working with that have a 9% sickness rate. I mean, it's kind of, you know, it's amazing, but they don't have answers, you know, because they just understand pedal to the metal and then the 9%. Okay. Well that's a cost.

00:18:41:24 - 00:18:45:02

Chris Tamdjidi

That's cost of it, you know, which is kind of bizarre. But anyway, so.

00:18:45:07 - 00:18:50:09

Kevin Daniels

Yeah, I've come across, you know, this level of absence or turnover, cost of doing business. Yeah.

00:18:50:13 - 00:19:18:00

Chris Tamdjidi

I mean really that yeah it doesn't have to be. And the numbers I'm seeing are shocking and a helplessness, a kind of a complete, you know, shoulder shrug helplessness. Okay. Well what can we do to, you know, so I mean, there's there's a lot of work that can be done. We can mention that too in a second. But anyway, so I think once that understanding is there then and it's about human resilience, it's not about systems resilience, you know then we have to understand okay, what do we as a company then need to do?

00:19:18:00 - 00:19:33:09

Chris Tamdjidi

So just like safety what do we as a company need to d?. So for example, one of the key issues at the company wide level is attention management or recovery. Okay. So there are some companies, you know, and really I asked people, when is the first time you check your emails every morning, and when is the last time you check your emails?

00:19:33:15 - 00:19:53:04

Chris Tamdjidi

And the standard answer is 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Okay. So, you know, if you just understand a little bit about human recovery and I really stress this in any high performance environment. So we mentioned I work a lot with a formula one team which is based in the UK. You know, you cannot maintain high performance if you do not have recovery.

00:19:53:06 - 00:20:09:02

Chris Tamdjidi

Every sportsperson knows that you. So it's kind of like obvious. And therefore when I meet companies that say, oh yeah, we're a high performance company, then the first thing I ask them, okay, what's your what's your recovery plan? And they look at me like, what’s he talking about? Why - you can't be high performance if you don't have an understanding of recovery.

00:20:09:03 - 00:20:28:10

Chris Tamdjidi

So yeah. So, you know, getting them to think like this and to realize, okay, if we want to be a high performance, if we want to have people navigating these zones, then we have to have habits in place at the organizational level which help recovery. We have to have habits in place which help attention regulation. We have to have habits in place which help positivity.

00:20:28:11 - 00:20:47:01

Chris Tamdjidi

And I'll just mention three of them. So for recovery, like one of the most important ones is to actually people, to get them to actually look at their emails and go, actually, is there any email which comes in after 8 p.m. at night which you know, or before 8 a.m. the morning, which is actually business critical, which cannot be dealt with the next day within the next five hours.

00:20:47:01 - 00:21:05:12

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. And most companies, when they do they will find, no, there isn't actually and therefore let's having done this not vaguely but specifically looked, we go you right everybody let's communicate. We do not need to check emails. You can send emails if you want to. We advise you to, you know, send them using outlook you know delayed send.

00:21:05:12 - 00:21:19:11

Chris Tamdjidi

But even if you send them. But everyone should know there is no reason why. And then you have to manage for it. So just like any safety situation, you then have to start measuring how many emails are being sent, by whom, at what hour, and is it affecting, you know, how many people are being triggered by that?

00:21:19:11 - 00:21:40:11

Chris Tamdjidi

So there was a fantastic quote by the CEO of Novartis, and he said, when I send a single email on the weekend, it leads to 700 people checking their emails on the weekend. They did a little assessment of that. So anyway, so that's an example of if you want to improve recovery, you have to do this kind of analysis and set these boundaries.

00:21:40:14 - 00:22:02:23

Chris Tamdjidi

Same for attention regulation okay. So for example, one of the key issues around attention regulation is that people don't have focus times. And there's a lot of evidence now coming out from Microsoft. How important focus times are for getting stuff done, for productivity and for wellbeing outcomes. So again, companies have to anchor focus time in people's schedules, but they have to do it in a realistic way, like one company, global Company, 80,000 people announced, oh yeah, we are going to Monday morning

00:22:02:23 - 00:22:19:24

Chris Tamdjidi

Focus times, you know, and that's bollocks, it’s not going to work. I mean, Monday morning it's just not going to work as a focus time that and so you know, you have to kind of look analytically what are the times and work for focus time. And then it can measure and target this. Let's say let's say 60% of people managing it okay.

00:22:20:05 - 00:22:37:03

Chris Tamdjidi

And then it gets to 70% in the year later. So just like with safety, you have to then measure your rituals, your habits and measure the outcome. And then the third one is things like, you know, positivity. One of the most effective things to do is actually start with the positive, okay? So many companies are ‘this is a problem’.

00:22:37:03 - 00:23:00:10

Chris Tamdjidi

‘This is a problem’. But actually most things work well. Most things are doing fine. Most people are working well. You know, I mean, so to actually start meetings with, okay, what's going well last week, that shifts people's perception. And it's a habit that you can you can anchor okay. So this is what I mean that companies have to understand, and that's what the work we're doing with them is to go, by type of work,

00:23:00:12 - 00:23:22:13

Chris Tamdjidi

what are the habits that you have as shared, anchored, which help people navigate through this landscape? Yeah. And I think that there's a lot of especially, you know, and we spoke about this before, that especially in the health and safety space, people understand because they've learned about safety that you can only shift safety at the organizational level through measured habits and rituals.

00:23:22:15 - 00:23:26:00

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. And that's, I think, the same thing that we need to do here in this general space.

00:23:26:02 - 00:23:43:02

Kevin Daniels

You also mentioned, businesses, you know, shoulder shrugging and the kind of, you know, what what can we do? And this this is an issue that we come across in some of the organizations that we work with as well, which is well, this is how we we do the business, this, this is just how it is.

00:23:43:07 - 00:23:48:22

Kevin Daniels

How do you go about sort of thinking about getting people to think beyond this is how it is?

00:23:48:24 - 00:24:05:01

Chris Tamdjidi

I mean, I think first of all, one thing that is, again, very missing for a lot of business is actually a total cost of ill health. They don't actually have that. It's all held in different parts of the business. You know, what is the medical costs here, the absence costs there or the EAP costs here and so on.

00:24:05:01 - 00:24:24:00

Chris Tamdjidi

So I think that that's the first step is for them to get clear what are actually the total costs of health real health for us okay. And it typically you know I've seen a number of analysis and I've worked with a gentleman in the UK, Marc Giles. And it it comes out to be about 5 to 7% of the salary of the pay of the, of the wage for us average, as it comes out to be.

00:24:24:02 - 00:24:39:19

Chris Tamdjidi

And that, of course means a huge variance depending on what your, you know, salary levels are. Okay. So, you know, for for companies that are, let's say in the finance sector, that might come out to be about, you know, 3,000 pounds a year. Okay. So I think that's very important. Is this first total, what is the cost actually of the situation.

00:24:39:21 - 00:24:55:17

Chris Tamdjidi

And then you have to kind of look at the cost drivers and of course the cost drivers. Number one cost drivers are long term absences okay. And there are methods for managing long term absences with good case management, which basically yield returns within a year. You know, you're not trying to signal to the person that they're a problem.

00:24:55:17 - 00:25:11:10

Chris Tamdjidi

You're trying to signal to the person that we are here for you by having good case management, okay, and case management immediately. What is the situation? Okay. How can we help you? So essentially, I mean, if you look at the benchmarks in case management, you see that actually there's a lot of delta. You can reduce long term absence by about 50%.

00:25:11:13 - 00:25:31:20

Chris Tamdjidi

For those people that have clear issues, you know, essentially what you need to do is you need to kind of take this proactive approach of understanding the costs and be being proactive in the areas where you can be proactive. And essentially what it does then is it releases funds, okay. Because essentially what happens is most companies are basically losing all their money or are pouring all their money into the remediation costs.

00:25:31:20 - 00:25:53:08

Chris Tamdjidi

You know, the absences and the kind of, you know, sick return to work and the kind of, you know, health, medical costs and have actually no funds left for real preventative skill development, organizational skill development. So I think the second step is once you have that, then getting companies to be more, much more proactive in an analytical way and say, okay, now do we have, you know, kind of got this managed?

00:25:53:10 - 00:26:02:20

Chris Tamdjidi

Let's now talk about skill building and let's talk about anchoring these skills into organizational sense. So that's I think the pathway that I see which I think is necessary, you know, absolutely necessary.

00:26:02:22 - 00:26:22:06

Kevin Daniels

Interesting phrase you use there: do what you can do. I think that's, that's you know, you have to do what you can do. Yeah. Not worry about the things that you can't. Yeah. I think that’s kind of more as you say sort of proactive preventative optimistic approach. Right. In a sense as well.

00:26:22:08 - 00:26:41:11

Kevin Daniels

One of the things that you did mention, I go back to the CEOs who sends an email and at least 700 people checking their email at the weekend. and we know do we can sort of links into the role of leadership in in this. So where and how do you see leaders fitting into this whole resilient business idea?

00:26:41:13 - 00:26:58:19

Chris Tamdjidi

Yeah. So it makes a big, big difference. I mean, first of all, you know, from all the best practice in the or the reviews of wellbeing always comes up. Leadership comes up, whether it's leadership as ambassadors or leadership in terms of the governance of the wellbeing, kind of, you know, space in that company and also in terms of the policies that leader sets.

00:26:58:19 - 00:27:22:11

Chris Tamdjidi

So, you know, classically, if you look at it, you see that the studies basically say that there's five areas where leaders have an impact, okay, or five ways. One is by their leadership style, hey, by basically how they listen, how they empower and so on. Okay. The second is just concretely by management in terms of the goals they set, resources they give, you know, just kind of and also the time availability they have.

00:27:22:11 - 00:27:40:08

Chris Tamdjidi

So typically nowadays leaders are spending like I think between 5 and 8% of their time actually managing people. And that's actually too little, you know. So if you look at this, if you look at their studies on the satisfaction that people have with their leadership and also their wellbeing, essentially you do need to spend more time with people, okay, in order to manage that.

00:27:40:08 - 00:28:11:13

Chris Tamdjidi

Well, the third thing is, of course, is, is HR processes, you know, kind of developing people and so on, what opportunities you give them. The fourth is naturally signposting of resources of of wellbeing resources. And then the fifth is really being proactive in establishing habits in your team. Okay. So again, we've done a lot of work on on, especially in hybrid work, looking at team habits, we saw from about 140 teams which team habits have the strongest impact on both wellbeing, psychological safety, innovation and performance?

00:28:11:13 - 00:28:30:04

Chris Tamdjidi

Okay. And that's the interesting thing is that, again, that when teams talk about and agree upon shared team habits, it leads to outcome. So those are five areas. This is where you know leaders have a real impact. And it's it is significant. You know if you look at there's some really interesting studies where you look at the correlation ratio of leadership style and burnout scores.

00:28:30:06 - 00:28:46:22

Chris Tamdjidi

It's about a .35 okay. So that's pretty high. You know that burnout is a complex topic. And if this was done about 100 across 140 departments and you saw that there's a 0.35 correlation between leadership style and burnout percentages in those departments. So it is a you know, it's a significant impact.

00:28:47:00 - 00:28:56:14

Kevin Daniels

So with with coming towards the end now, Chris, is there anything that we haven't touched which you'd like to point out or any question that I didn't ask you, but you want me to ask?

00:28:56:16 - 00:29:15:05

Chris Tamdjidi

What I find important is to shift to thinking about it as a skill building process. Okay, so away from, you know, just as a wellbeing process or a wellbeing interventions. But I would say actually it's really about skill building that basically we know the stress is not going to go away and people need to have skills to regulate stress.

00:29:15:11 - 00:29:32:24

Chris Tamdjidi

And there are different skills. And actually we've seen that there's different stress profiles for different types of jobs too. So you can actually kind of look at certain jobs and say, okay, what's the stress profile of that job? What are the skills, resilience skills people are going to need. And I think that that way of thinking, actually, again, companies are quite good at that.

00:29:33:01 - 00:29:54:19

Chris Tamdjidi

Companies are actually quite good at skill building. Okay. And so I think that that is another way of really empowering this topic and saying, hey, it's not about, you know, whatever various, you know, wellbeing things, interventions, but actually it's fundamentally about understanding. There are skills that people have in regulating their state, which should help them to function well.

00:29:54:21 - 00:30:09:12

Chris Tamdjidi

And we need to build these skills and we need to build these skills at the individual level, at large scale. So we, for example, do resilience academies where we have a thousand people going through them in a year, okay. And each person does a self assessment of their skills and then says, okay, I need to work on this skill and that skill.

00:30:09:14 - 00:30:27:17

Chris Tamdjidi

And I think that that's, you know, kind of very important that people are individually empowered to figure out what's good for them, whether they need to work on. But at the same time, the organization says, and we recognize in these departments, the stress or load is too high and we need to take responsibility. And that's, I think, you know, the shared responsibility of management.

00:30:27:17 - 00:30:44:07

Chris Tamdjidi

And, and, you know, kind of staff is not, you know, if there's a blame game, you know, you're the fault of wellbeing. No, no, you're not doing enough. Right. No no no no. But actually no, it's it's a shared responsibility. And once you begin to analytically pick it apart, then you can actually, you know, kind of put the responsibility and support the people where it belongs.

00:30:44:08 - 00:30:53:11

Chris Tamdjidi

I think that once you understand the skill building thing, you can actually have a whole shift in the way you think about it. And I think that that's kind of maybe the final point. I want to kind of just underscore.

00:30:53:13 - 00:31:12:13

Kevin Daniels

Yeah, I think that that's a that's a really good point, actually. Sometimes you think, especially when people talk about doing things in organizational level around jobs, people think you’re going to have to change a business model. But if you think about it, I mean, we tend to take that as a, as a cultural thing, as a skill thing, then you're not fundamentally changing nature of your business.

00:31:12:13 - 00:31:36:00

Kevin Daniels

What you're doing is enabling people to work in that business better. And although when this goes out, it won't be video, so the listeners cannot see what I can see, but I can see behind you the phrase we cultivate human flourishing organizations and that, you know, sort of really does link in to the nature of it's, you know, it's about the cultural organization.

00:31:36:05 - 00:31:40:20

Chris Tamdjidi

Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. And culture comes from regular habits, you know. Yep.

00:31:40:22 - 00:32:04:23

Kevin Daniels

Absolutely. So that's that's been absolutely fascinating, Chris. I've really enjoyed that. And, I'm sure that our listeners have as well. It's been really insightful, kind of a very, very good exposition around, you know, why it's important to, you know, look at the organization. Look at the culture. You know, and using the organization as a support for people has been great.

00:32:04:23 - 00:32:05:17

Kevin Daniels

Thank you.

00:32:05:19 - 00:32:08:07

Chris Tamdjidi

To my pleasure. Thanks, Kevin, for your questions. It was great.

00:32:08:07 - 00:32:12:22

Kevin Daniels

You know, it's been great to have you on. Thank you.

00:32:12:24 - 00:32:28:01

Helen Fitzhugh

Please do visit. www.evolveworkplacewellbeing.org. We look forward to seeing you next time.